How Bianca Jackson Helps Transform Dallas Women’s Lives: Frontline Hero Spotlight

How the CEO of nonprofit New Friends New Life works to restore and empower trafficked teen girls and sexually exploited women and their children in the Dallas/Ft. Worth metro area area by caring for their basic needs, helping with their case management, and enabling their economic empowerment.

When a woman walks through the doors of New Friends New Life, there’s one thing she immediately wants to know: “Are you on my side or not?”

That woman is, on average, 32 years old, with a limited high school education and several children, who makes less than $24,000/year, and may have a criminal record. She has also been either sexually trafficked or exploited.

Bianca Jackson is the CEO of NFNL, and her response to that initial question usually goes like this: “Absolutely. We’re here because you took the opportunity to change your life, to want a better path, and we’re here to help you do that.”

Impacting people’s lives

Years ago, a teenage Bianca was sitting on her parents’ bed in the Bahamas. This was before she moved to Philadelphia for college, then to Dallas to work in guest relations and internal communications for a hospital; it was before she became the development director at Genesis Women’s Shelter in Dallas and later became CEO at NFL. A 15-year-old Bianca was watching the news, and she remembers seeing a story about a young boy who was beaten by his father because the boy had wet the bed. The story stuck with her.

“I couldn’t process it, couldn’t get around it,” she says. “I knew right then that if I had the chance to do anything that could in any way affect a kid like that, that’s what I wanted to do with my life.”

And she does. New Friends New Lives helps women, teens, and children who have often been impacted by childhood trauma, domestic violence, and sex trafficking. Her work often makes her think of that little boy. “It’s one of my greatest blessings that I get to show up every day and impact people’s lives,” she says.

As CEO, Bianca interacts directly with the nearly 400 people that NFNL helps each year, and she also works to build a culture of effectiveness and care at the organization as a whole.

To do that, she shows up as her authentic self every day, “In many circles, I’m the only one who looks like me,” says Bianca. “I walk into a room of donors and no one looks like me. But someone still said, ‘You belong here, and your message can be heard, and you can make an impact,’ and that’s what I try to do for other people.”

Bianca enjoys being able to make that impact in Dallas, a city she calls “the perfect combination of people who have passion and resources to make a difference.”

And there’s one thing she always stresses when she’s meeting with donors, whether at big luncheons or in everyday community work: how much more alike than different New Friend New Life’s members (what the organization calls the women it works with, to avoid the trigger word “client”) are from them.

“There can be this ‘those people’ complex that happens, as if it could never be them, could never be anyone they knew. I wish people really knew and understood how easily it could be our daughters, grandkids, nieces,” says Bianca.

Caring for the whole person

The women that show up to NFNL, often after hearing about it from a friend, are ready to change their lives — they just need help.

The work that the New Friends New Life team, led by Bianca, does falls into three care areas:

• Case management. First, NFNL focuses on securing food, safety, and shelter for survivors of sex trafficking and exploitation and their families. “When that woman is walking through the door, her needs are basic,” says Bianca. “She needs financial support because one of the things that keeps her tethered to the trafficking life is that it maintains her. Our programs allow us to help pay a portion of her rent and utilities as she achieves benchmarks in our program as we help to stabilize her.”
• Counseling. NFNL offers expert-led trauma-informed counseling from experts and trained physicians. “The biggest lesson I’ve learned that is all these nonprofits, whether [focused on] sex trafficking, domestic violence, or sexual assault, we’re serving the same woman. She is just on a different place in the spectrum of violence against women,” says Bianca.
• Economic empowerment. This initiative helps survivors re-integrate into society, which often includes working to reduce a criminal record to help women get jobs and leases.

By the end of NFNL’s program, which can take as little as a year or as long as several to complete, participants are saving money, paying their own bills, and advancing along their chosen career path.

“It’s a quantifiable, identifiable path to success,” says Bianca, who loves seeing program alumni move into their own homes, significantly improve their credit, and achieve their educational goals. Several of them have even been hired by NFNL to help work with other survivors. “Survivor-led leadership is critical, especially in the anti-trafficking space,” says Bianca.

Bianca is especially proud of a teen girl that NFNL worked with who graduated as valedictorian of her high school class and is now in her second semester at Texas State University, with plans to be an attorney. “We’re able to track and validate that this program is permanently life-changing. It sets her on a separate, new path,” says Bianca.

Other NFNL programs include a mentorship group for at-risk teen girls between 12 and 22 to give them support and resources and a men’s advocacy group to mobilize boys and men to take action against sex trafficking and exploitation.

How NeighborShare helps

NFNL’s care managers are experts at dealing with unexpected needs, but they can always use extra help.

“The winter storm that just came through Texas is an example,” says Bianca. “Our women are already in such a fragile state, it doesn’t take much to throw them off. Being able to meet those immediate, basic, short-term needs is very helpful.”

That might be helping an expecting mother stock up on diapers, or buying bedding for a program graduate who is moving into her first apartment.

“The case managers know exactly what those needs are and how quickly they come up, and they can identify who needs them,” says Bianca. “These are everyday people who are coming here for help and support, and NeighborShare will be impactful on their journey.”

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